Transatlantic Aesthetics and Culture – serie

The Mediterranean world has long had strong cultural links to Great Britain as well as to the United States. Through the analysis of artistic objects and critical writings that crystallise this encounter, the essays in this volume demonstrate the variety and complexity of the connections between two geographical zones and two or more cultures.Mediterranean cultures are shown to haunt American and British culture and artistic productions. The relation between British and American literature and art on the one hand, and Mediterranean arts on the other goes beyond the mere inscription of British and American culture in a Mediterranean tradition. British and American culture and art come out as unearthing a wide variety of Mediterranean artistic forms, renewing and transforming them.This collection shows how lively the encounter between the Mediterranean and the English-Speaking worlds still is. It highlights how much English as well as American culture and art owe today to the Mediterranean ones; how, mainly in the fields of literature and art, the two civilisations have never discontinued the dialogue they adumbrated centuries ago.

This book focuses on the development of Italian American cultural identity throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Italy is becoming a destination, rather than a starting point for immigrants. Immigration remains a source of tension and debate both in the United States and in Europe. Analyzing the evolution of Italian American identity, from diaspora to globalization, from emblematic to latent ethnicity, can thus prove insightful.Disparate works, including novels, films and newspaper articles, both by Italian and non-Italian American authors illustrate this paradigm. The catalyst for this transformation is the Second World War, which allowed Italian Americans to take part in the struggle to liberate Italy from Fascism, establishing in this way a connection with their roots while adhering more closely to mainstream American society through participation in the conflict. Post-war expressions of Italian American culture include the development of women’s writing, cinematic interactions with American Jews and African Americans, and the works of two novelists, Don DeLillo and Anthony Giardina, who embody different aspects of latent ethnicity.

This volume is the product of a joint effort to bring together critical views "from the Old World" on the field of American Studies. The contributors are leading Americanists working in Spanish academia who believe in the importance of working on American Studies from a multidisciplinary, inclusive perspective. The volume constitutes a testimony to the current state of research on American Studies in Spain, which occupies a key position in the transatlantic appreciation of the field. Ranging from Romanticism to Postmodernism, form the human to the post-human, from the Salem witchcraft trials to the Holocaust, from the Other to the Zombie, from fiction to history, from African-American slavery to Native-American reservations, from Spanish Unamunian philosophy to Whitmanesque poetry—to name just a few of the themes discussed in these pages—this entire volume is grounded on a transatlantic vision and dialogue, which has taken on great importance after the so-called "transatlantic turn." All in all, this book provides the critical gaze of the "expert outsider" who is able to offer a somewhat different but complementary point of view, which can only enrich the general appreciation of American Studies.

Taking their cue from the polymorphous relationship between word and image, the essays of this book explore how different media translate the world of phenomena into aesthetic, intellectual or sensual experience. They embrace the media of poetry, fiction, drama, engraving, painting, photography, film and advertising posters ranging from the early modern to the postmodern periods. At the heart of the volume lie essays on works that characteristically perform intriguing interactions between the verbal and visual modes. They discuss the manifold ways in which artists as different as William Blake or Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus or Stanley Kubrick heighten the tension between the linguistic and the seen. Taken both individually and collectively, this volume’s contributions illuminate the problematics of how readers and spectators/lookers transform verbal and visual representation into worlds of seeming.

The essays in this book offer new perspectives on the concept of liminality. They explore the relevance and significance of the limen or threshold from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, and across a broad range of historical periods. The authors all seek to revisit key questions raised in recent literary and cultural criticism, whilst also moving that discussion in new directions. In particular, the essays stress the importance of defining liminality for particular literary and cultural contexts, and highlight the fact that whilst it is liberating and progressive in some instances, in others it is violent and oppressive. Examining texts from the early modern to the postmodern periods, by authors on both sides of the Atlantic, the volume embraces a wide range of literary forms, including novels, travel narratives, religious texts, and philosophical treatises; it also includes consideration of non-literary forms of representation such as photography. This book reveals the complexity of the concept of liminality, and underscores its powerfulness and potential for understanding the ways in which both individuals and communities, in the past and in the present day, negotiate states of transition, and give expression to their experience of being ‘in-between’.

The full story of modernism is yet to be written. This collection of essays provides an important page in this complex and inconclusive story of fluidities and hybridities by rendering problematical the linear sequence from modernism to postmodernism. This book explores the many facets of modernism in a variety of essays written by an international group of scholars. It deals with and puts in question the western literary tradition in many of its transcontinental and trans-hemispheric encounters. Criticism of ‘high modernism’ is put in perspective by discussions of German ‘reactionary modernism’, American ‘social modernism’ and ‘minor arts’, mid-twentieth-century ‘Baudelairean modernity’ and unprecedented expansions of the concepts of modernity and modernism themselves. Engaging in dialogue with the newest geographical, transnational, and global enlargements of the concept of modernism in time and space (from the ‘Middle Passage’ to emergent cultures of the twenty-first century, from Europe to America, Africa and Asia), the volume covers a wide range of translocal and transtemporal literary, artistic, cultural, and social fields and perspectives.